Educate! Leaders Share Strategies for Sustainability at International Education Conference

In April, two Educate! leaders joined researchers, practitioners, and policy makers from around the world at the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) annual meeting, sharing their expertise on the theme of Education for Sustainability. The gathering tackled tough questions about the sustainability of development interventions in the education space. Drawing on their extensive experience, Educate!’s Monitoring and Evaluation Director, Meghan Mahoney, and Head of Program Implementation, Modern Karema, provided insight on two engaging panels:

Recycle, reuse, [reexamine], reintroduce: Leveraging diverse data to build sustainable learning loops

How should organizations innovate in education, particularly in low-resource environments? How do we raise the bar for years to come, doing the most good for the most people, without doing harm?

Monitoring and Evaluation Director Meghan participated on the panel alongside Pencils of Promise and Bridge International Academies — peer organizations working to increase the capacity of teachers and students across Africa and Asia. While the organizational approaches differ, they are united in the belief that creating sustainable, meaningful impact requires strong data.

The panel examined the importance of data in building a system that encourages learning and spurs program improvement, and made the case for practitioners, policy makers, and donors to recognize the value of investments in data. The panel also emphasized the need to be strategic and deliberate in capturing information for impact:an organization is never too small to build a strong data foundation, nor too large to reexamine its practices.

To learn more about our collection and use of data, check out our Monitoring and Evaluation Approach.

Educating for the 21st century: Experiences from the Regional Education Learning Initiative in East Africa

The Regional Education Learning Initiative (RELI) brings together more than 60 civil society organizations from across East Africa to exchange information and learning around successful interventions for preparing young people with the skills to succeed in the changing world of work.  Participating in a panel with other RELI partners, Head of Program Implementation Modern took participants into a classroom to experience Educate!’s ‘Skills Lab’ — the innovative teaching model that puts students at the center of their own learning and promotes the practical application of skills. Modern’s interactive presentation highlighted a unique aspect of Educate!’s approach — that life skills are obtained through both content (curriculum) and method (process of learning). Employing a 3-part pedagogical format, teachers first lay the foundation for a new concept (Build), students then practice implementing or investigating in groups or alone (Practice), and finally students synthesize and summarize their learnings (Present). Skills Lab is a fundamentally sustainable, no-cost tool to make education more practical and student-centered.